Fast & Efficient Highlighting

Highlighting in a document can often be a trying event. With the speed of many of today’s computers you find yourself zooming past your intended stopping point before you realize you’ve even begun.

There is more to highlighting than just clicking at your starting point, holding the left mouse button and dragging the highlight through the document (often missing your intended stopping point several times).

The mouse can be quicker and more exact than all that zooming back and forth if you know a few simple tricks.

First trick – “It’s all in the click”

When you’re trying to highlight text it’s all in the number of clicks.

The first click over a word places the cursor in the space below your pointer.

If you double-click a word, the entire word will be highlighted.

If you want to go crazy, a triple-click will highlight the entire paragraph below the pointer. (It’s important to note here that the third click must be done rather quickly after the second.) Give it a try and you’ll get a feel for how fast it must be done.

Here’s a little bonus:

Did you get a little click happy?

Too many clicks and you blew by your intended target?

No problem.

You might have noticed that continuing to click reverses this whole process.

So no sweat – get your clicking finger under control and you’ll still get where you meant to be in a matter of seconds.

Second trick – “The Shifty Highlight”

If you have a lot of text to highlight – let’s say more than one paragraph where the triple-click is useless – than this one is for you.

Place the cursor at the beginning of the text to be highlighted.

Scroll to the end of the text that needs to be highlighted. (It’s important not to click.)

Hold down the Shift key and click at the end of the desired highlighting.

Viola! All the text in between should be highlighted.

No more super speeding windows screaming past your eyes.

No more landing at the top or bottom of the entire document before you can even blink.

It’s quick, easy and exact.

This entry was posted
on Friday, November 19th, 2004 at 11:04 AM and is filed under MS Office Help.
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